Weekly Linkfest

Posted on January 3, 2010 by rouli

The last week of 2009 was quite a slow one, and having Thomas K. Carpenter join Games Alfresco, diminishes my list of resources even further. Nevertheless, here are some AR related news-bits that we haven’t covered this week:

Now, if I get it right, Soho is a men magazine from Colombia that employed AR to boost its sales. Which is one step closer to my prediction about Playboy getting augmented. (via Design Memo for Ourselves)

Have a great week!

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Merry Weekly Linkfest

Posted on December 20, 2009 by rouli

Two important events are coming this week –

  1. The conclusion of our little project, collecting augmented reality predictions for the new year.
  2. Christmas

Although the former event is much more important, for some strange reason, I was swamped this week with links relating to the latter. A short list of holiday related AR application that caught my eye since my last post “it’s the season to be augmented“:

Whoof!
Oh right, there were other news this week. Augmented Planet published their results for the first AR people-choice awards. Wikitude won the browsers category, but which participitant won the Chumby? Layar had to withdraw Layar 3.0 from the appstore. Thomas Carpenter has a listing of the worst AR uses this year. A good use is to encourage people to donate blood, like they do in Japan. Total Immersion created Avatar related AR apps for McDonalds and Coke. Wallpaper magazine fancies an AR edition. And another week, another car gets an AR campaign (though it’s technically from June).

The weekly video shows Total Immersion’s implementation of a haunted house in Japan. Thomas wrote a full post about it, while I just tweeted that it looks really scarry:

Have a great week and merry augmented Christmas, if that concerns you!

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on December 6, 2009 by rouli

Before the linkfest, let me share some exciting news. Starting from tomorrow, and throughout the week, I’ll be posting augmented reality predictions for 2010 from top AR luminaries. But wait, there’s more – I’m hoping to harness wisdom of the very smart crowds reading this blog, by putting on a survey were you can vote for your favorite predictions. Hope to see you tomorrow!

And now, as usual, the weekly linkfest:

  • The first AR DevCamp was held yesterday. Thomas Wrobel (can I say our very own Thomas Wrobel?) had an FAQ prepared for the occasion, about the AR wave initiative.
  • On the mobile browsers front – Layar 3.0 is out (also see AugmentedPlanet’s review). I should have really dedicated a post for it. In a nutshell, this latest version, and the presented use-cases are really making Layar much more than just a “browser”. You can create augmented tours, games, and city scapes which is a huge step over just showing the “closest” x.
  • Augment Pro review of Presselite’s Twitter-360, a browser like app that shows you nearby tweets from your friends
  • And AcrossAir is behind “Le Bar Guide” an application created for beer label Stella Artois that lets you find closest bars (serving that beer).
  • Sarnoff presents an augmented reality training system for the US military with virtual baddies. I really want to see a video of that.
  • Augmented reality via Silverlight (Microsoft response to Adobe’s Flash).
  • Laboratory4 is offering the joys of a fashion show right in your own home.
  • Pandemica is another fast paced pseudo AR shooting game for the iPhone.

Weekly quote comes from OneZeroThrice’s piece “Who Is, and Who Isn’t Augmented Reality“(yeah, I gave you the punchline, but you should read the whole article)

if only we, who know the difference between good and crap AR, can be more vocal – if we can start saying what we mean and not be afraid of pissing off the people who make this garbage … maybe we’ll actually save this industry from what happened to Virtual Reality.

And the weekly video is another “augmented” magic trick from Marco Tempest (see the first one here) (via The Future Digital Life):

Have a nice week, and don’t forget to come back tomorrow for a peak at 2010.

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on November 1, 2009 by rouli

While reading this week’s linkfest you may find some links are missing – don’t worry, many ISMAR related links and videos will be posted later this week.

Although Halloween was yesterday, and I’ve dedicated a whole post to Halloween related AR, here’s another cute scarry example found by Bruce Sterling. Actually is part of a campaign to promote eco-friendly chargers and power managemant systems, and you can try it yourself here.

Have a nice week!

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Augmented Job Board

Posted on October 24, 2009 by rouli

Short note – Layar is looking for Android developers.
As always, you can find this and many other open positions at Games Alfresco’s Jobs section, and you are welcome to tell us about open positions in your company, we’ll post them for free.

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on October 18, 2009 by rouli

Not going to ISMAR :\. Since going to Florida is not an easy trip for me, I would have like to stay there for more than a couple of days. However, my current workload maje such a vacation impossible. I’m sure Ori and Thomas will do a great work covering it. In the meantime, I’ll take the next few days off from blogging, and will be back with my 200th post (woot!). Hope to see you all at ISMAR Korea!
Now, having done with the excuses, here’s the weekly linkfest:

Articles & Videos

Augmented Reality Browsers:

  • Following Wikitude, media favorite Layar is now on the appstore.
  • Following Yelp, Urbanspoon adds an augmented reality view.
  • Lodestone AR Compass is a browser for the great outdoors. Two bucks and it’s on your iPhone.
  • CiviCast (from CiviGuard) is an augmented reality browser for civil services with a lofty goal – “To guide & protect global civilian populations in the event of a crisis through authoritative & reliable information delivery over mobile communications networks.”
  • Can’t even call it a browser, 3d Compass is just a floating compass for Android.

Other

The weekly video is from the Australian band Lost Valentinos. In order to promote their latest single (Nightmoves) they chose (what a surprise) to use augmented reality. We have seen AR clips before and AR used to promote singles as well (see for example this application for Eminem). However, Lost Valentinos found a simple yet ingenious way to use augmented reality – they shot each band member perform the song on its own, match each one with a marker, and let their fans to compose their own videoclip via AR. As the press release says – “From lead singer Nik performing the song atop a user’s shoulders, to the whole band playing the song at the base of the Eiffel Tower”. Try it yourself over here (and btw, don’t search for nightmoves on Youtube from work).

Have a great week!

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 23, 2009 by rouli

Hope you didn’t miss the weekly linkfest’s early edition, published yesterday, covering some of the best articles, posts and talks that were published during the week. Here are some more interesting bits from around the AR ecosystems making news this week:

And finally, this week video comes from Hongik University of South Korea. It shows a project named “Will be”, created in 2004 (and presented in ISMAR05), which is the augmented reality take on a story board. It’s quite nice, though some of the features could have been more accessible if they were implemented via standard GUI, rather than ARUI:

Have a nice week!

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Layar, Layar, Layar

Posted on August 17, 2009 by rouli

If you read this post, you are probably an avid reader of this blog.
If you are an avid reader of this blog, you are probably interested in AR.
If you are interested in AR, you probably know that Layar had a fantastic day, at least PR wise:

As a matter of fact, this day was such a success for Layar, that it seems that layar.com and layar.eu are quite slugish, probably due to a surge in visitors. Is it too late for Mobilizy (Wikitude) and acrossair? (I really hope not).

Even more details, on Layar’s blog.

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Weekly Linkfest

Posted on August 16, 2009 by rouli

Last week I published a poll, asking how do you define yourself – are you an engineer, an artist or maybe an Entrepreneur? As of writing this post, 75 readers have answered the poll, 34 of them (45%) identified themselves as engineers. I thought there would be more artists among you (15%), and was surprised by the percent of entrepreneurs (15%). The poll is still open, so you can still cast a vote.
Moving on to the weekly linkfest (it gets bigger every week!) –

  • Metaio blitzed the airwaves with two podcasts – Noora Guldemond (head of sales and marketing) interviews here and Peter Meier, Metaio’s CTO is giving an interview here. Sadly, I haven’t found the time last week to hear them, but I plan to do so in the next few days.
  • And it was a good week for SPRXMobile (Layar) as well. Aparently, Layar comes preinstalled on Samsung’s new Android phone, they were featured on The Financial Times, and things are only going to get better, since they are holding their first Layar event.
  • TweetWorld is Gamaray’s attempt to have an augmented tweeter application, joinning the ranks of Layar and TwittAround.
  • The BBC – Mobile phones get cyborg vision: “Not only could this form of rich, intuitive and easy to grasp data be the next killer app for the mobile, some see it changing our world view forever.“
  • ReadWriteWeb – Augmented Reality: A Human Interface for Ambient Intelligence: “Augmented reality (or AR) is fast becoming as ubiquitous a term as Web 2.0. The field is getting noisier by the day, and AR as a field of research now has to co-exist with its status as an industry buzzword“
  • A short introduction to programming AR applications for the Android OS.
  • Is this the first augmented shirt on Threadless?
  • CrashCorp demos a rudimentry AR application for the iPhone.
  • YDreams and Zugara join the AR consortium (can I join too?)
  • And Zugara (covered previously here) also launched what must be the second augmented reality game on Facebook (since last week Total Immersion had the first), CannonBallz (video). Just four years ago, we would have called this kind of games “Eye Toy” like, but today we have new buzzwords. Still, it is a well produced game.

Our weekly video is of a game created by Circ.us, to promote Chris Angel’s new show, “The five lives of Chris Angel”. Since it’s a puzzle game, and this summer turned me into a brain-dead blogger, I haven’t tried it myself to give an educated review. You, on other hand, can play it here, or just watch the embedded video below:

As always, have a nice week!

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Two More AR Browsers to Join the Party

Posted on August 14, 2009 by rouli

Are you a Wikitude or Layar supporter? Maybe Sekai Camera fan? The battle for supremacy at the augmented reality browsers market is getting more complicated by the minute, with two new contenders joining the fight.
First, acrossair which brought us the Tube Finder, is now showing off a very slick “general purpose” AR browser for the iPhone 3GS:

Next, GraffitiGeo, a fresh new startup that wants to create a Digg like service for real places is working on an AR version of their application, also for the iPhone:

(more details about GraffitiGeo here).

So, now we are at five AR browsers. Anyone wants to bet how many browsers there will be by this time next year? (my guess – only three serious contenders, and one of them will be owned by Google).

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